Diocese Building Own ‘Think Tank’

After an on‐again off‐again existence dating from 1968, a new Diocesan Pastoral Council in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, which also covers Queens, has nearly reached the end of an agonizing 12‐month “first phase” of organization with the help of management consultants.

The process is slow and steady, its members say. But to give free run to exotic, if popular, decision‐making processes such as consensus, self‐evaluation and establishing priorities is more easily said than done for the 59 clergymen and laity reared on a lifetime of toe‐the‐line Church rules and Robert's Rules of Order.

The slow advance of the council as a new organization in the diocese, which has 1.3 million Catholics, has been aided by the Rev. George Wilson, a Jesuit, and staff members with the firm of Management Design, Inc., of Cincinnati, under a $10,000 one‐year contract. It ends next month. Sixty per gent of the concern's clients are religious groups with organizational problems.

The management concern was hired, according to the Msgr. Charles E. Diviney, Vicar General, when the Diocesan Pastoral Council—whose predecessor had been disbanded in the late nineteensixties—was reactivated in 1972 and began to flounder on the issue of how to choose its members.

Management Design suggested criteria and the resultant provisional council has met regularly and at length since mid‐1974 with so little publicity that a letter writer to a local Catholic paper recently wondered what happened to it.

There are few models for such councils in other Catholic dioceses. And the decree of the Second Vatican Council, which mandated them, and subsequent Vatican documents, have little to say about the specifics of their organization, Monsignor Diviney said.

The primary purpose of Diocesan Councils, the Vatican documents agree, is to be “advisory” to the bishop. But virtually nothing is said about how big a council should be, except that it should be representative, or whether it should have constitution or bylaws or how often its members should meet or be selected.

In its first year of lengthy monthly meetings—one was a session last Nov. 15 to 17 at Immaculate Conception Seminary, Lloyd Harbor, L.I., where the council set its goals — council members have taken a number of firm steps toward self‐determination.

It has named a six‐man steering committee and several subcommittees geared to “needs” of urban church life in Brooklyn and Queens. One, for instance, has to do with “Tensions” and another with “Education.”

It has evaluated its own progress, and thrashed over a statement of what “ministry” means to the church in the crowded, racially diverse see.

At its most recent meeting, last Tuesday night at Cathedral Preparatory Seminary, 56‐25 92d St., Elmhurst, Queens, the provisional council got its first request from Bishop Francis J. Mugavero, an informal smiling man who already refers to the council as his “think tank.”

“Will the council tell me how to advance or improve the effectiveness of our vicariates?” he asked, speaking of the five subdivisions of the Brooklyn Diocese by which the Bishop's office has sought to decentralize its functions.

Another principal report was given by an off‐duty New York police sergeant, Jesse Peterman, of Astoria, Queens, who reported on the tangle that his vocations subcommittee got into when it tried to unscramble the ecclesiastical references contained in a statement about how the council could serve as a catalyst and reconciler within the “extended family of the church in Brooklyn.”

The statement of aims, he noted, had already been discussed at the March meeting, but when it was reviewed by the committee, it was criticized for “vagueness.” It did not emphasize, he said, “the things that are dividing the people in the Diocese of Brooklyn.”

“We're beginning to see ourselves as really functional,” said Sergeant Peterman, later. “But it's all so new, the council is still a bit like a jellyfish.”

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A version of this archives appears in print on May 11, 1975, on Page 90 of the New York edition with the headline: Diocese Building Own ‘Think Tank’. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe